Technical Coordinator's Report July 2005

Distro

The last few months have seen Computerbank make small changes to the distribution; glitches were found and the setup of the issue tracker on the website http://vic.computerbank.org.au/wiki/FrontPage/issuetracker has enabled us to identify technical problems and address them. Kylie, Jan and John S (perhaps others?) have been adding/resolving many software related issues. The issue tracker is a great addition to the website. Feel free to add or resolve an issue if you get the chance. Kylie, Jan and John have led the way.

Work for the Dole participants have been stress testing a system with a 2.6.9 kernel; feedback has been positive.

A 'distro meeting' was held last week at Computerbank. Major points arising from the meeting include:

• Development box to be setup in software for the purpose of testing new features
• Updates to be incorporated on a yearly basis Kernel 2.6.9 to replace kernel 2.4.24
• Kernel Bootsplash (wishlist item)
• KDE upgraded to 3.4.1
• Menu item for DHCP
• BPA login script in /root (for Telstra Bigpond Cable Internet clients)
• Konqueror to replace XFE as the file manager
• HP Scanner software to be included
• XMMS skins to be included
  
• ALSA mixer to replace Kmix
• Reborn is to be excluded from CD release
• DMA turned on in the init scripts
• Win 32 codecs to be obtained from ftp.nerim.net
• Skype

The above software is in testing stage at the moment. I hope to have the release ready over the next month or so.

Glenn M is working on Debian metapackages at the moment, Barry K has made further progress with language integration, David L created a bootable CD-ROM which has been used by the software people for software installation. John S continues to do a great job maintaining the distribution.

Great work guys!

Con Validas
Technical Coordinator